Pages

2016/01/06

I was back up North recently to do a talk on Gothic writing.
During the trip I found myself drawn, drawn, to an area I used to visit as a
child: the Accrington – Blackburn stretch of the Leeds and Liverpool Canal. I’ve written about this waterway before. But this particular section,
known semi-officially as Cycle Route 6, is the part I had in mind when going on
about strange snake appearances.

Cycle Route 6: complete with raindrops on the video camera lens

This spot marks out something of a borderland between open
fields and dense industrial sites. Upstream, the canal moves past a series of
small towns and remains largely hidden at their edges. Sometimes it will raise
its head at a road bridge but it mainly seems content to meander beside fields
and (now more likely) golf courses. But at this point, just before Church Kirk,
the canal leaves a wide open expanse and begins to narrow as it moves alongside
the flanking walls of Blythe Chemicals. I could make a cheap point and allude
to Axis Chemicals from the 1989 Batman
film which, to be honest, I always had in mind whenever I passed the factory
site. But to draw on such a deliberately blighted image would entirely miss the
point. There’s no binary tension here between the industrial and the rural,
with the former as some kind of pox upon the latter. It’s easy to place canals
with roads and railways as transportation systems that have encroached upon and
negatively impacted the landscape. But like hedgerows, dry stone walls and
towpaths, the canal represents another form of infrastructural cultivation that
has scaped the land over successive
generations of its working life, both agricultural and heavy-industrial.

You can see the traces of this intermingling all along the
pathway. Before the canal meets the yards at Blythe's, you come across a set of
submerged coke ovens: odd, brick igloos once used to carbonize coal. Most of
them have been filled in and you can just about see the brick domes undulating
under the scrub-land. In the late 1980s and early 90s though, they were much
more exposed and lay like pit traps in the ground. I think someone once made
the obvious link and used them as the backdrop for a film about the First World
War. Part trenches and part mortar craters, they carry the archaeological
resonances of the site, much like the imprinted caisson walls in J.G. Ballard’s
Empire of the Sun (1987).

Today it’s clear that the canal has moved away from its role
in factory trade and transportation, but this specific stretch of waterway is
not entirely post-industrial nor is it fully gentrified. Despite the occasional
houseboat and despite being implicitly re-branded as a leisure site, Cycle
Route 6 doesn’t seem to have fully shaken off the dust of its coal-charging
past. It's redundant in the original sense of the word: the waters are still,
but it feels active with industrial and chemical energy. Rammed somewhere
between a chemical plant and the Nori brick works up at Whinney Hill; crossed
with railway lines and in sight of garages and back-street scrap yards, it’s
not particularly picturesque, it’s not particularly quiet and it’s always
looked stagnant, like something straight out of John Barr’s Derelict Britain (1969). This, of
course, is why I like it so much.

The House on the Borderland

I had been reading Susan Hill’s The Woman in Black (1983) ahead of the trip. In addition to
understanding the value of a carefully constructed framing device, Hill places
her writing well within the tradition of M.R. James and horizontal, landscape
gothic. Where James has his East Anglian beaches, Hill transplants wintered Suffolk to the imaginary marshlands of the north east, “a
remote corner of England”.
Crossing the Nine Lives Causeway to reach the notorious Eel Marsh House,
Hills’s narrator Arthur Kipps describes the estuary plain as a space of sublime
bleakness:

Today there were no
clouds at all, but I could well imagine how magnificently the huge, brooding
area of sky would look with grey, scudding rain and storm clouds lowering over
the estuary, how it would be here in the floods of February time when the
marshes turned to iron-grey and the sky seeped down into them, and in the high
winds of March, when the light rippled, shadow chasing shadow across the
ploughed fields.

The monochromatic colour-scheme, the rain, the flatness and
the sly hints of agriculture and industry: all this matches my impressions of
the Accrington-Blackburn canal. It matches my impressions but also, inevitably,
my memories, complete with all the fabricated, simulated and nostalgic
productivity that accompanies them.

Shortly after this description comes Kipps’s first encounter
with Eel Marsh House itself:

It stood like some
lighthouse or beacon or martello tower, facing the whole, wide expanse of marsh
and estuary, the most astonishingly situated house I had ever seen or could
ever have conceivably imagined, isolated, uncompromising but also, I thought, handsome.
As we neared it, I saw the land on which it stood was raised up a little,
surrounding it on every side for perhaps three or four hundred yards, of plain,
salt-bleached grass, and then gravel. This little island extended in a
southerly direction across an area of scrub and field towards what looked like
the fragmentary ruins of some old church or chapel.

This is James’s preceptory rendered by way of Poe’s House of Usher. The marshland is another “singularly dreary tract of country” where
Kipps ‘finds’ himself after travelling “the whole of a dull, dark, and
soundless day”. On Route 6 there’s a similar house that stands in the fields on
the far side of the canal. It lies parallel with the verge of the railway
elevation on a small valley floor. In my mind this tract was an open, barren
plateau in which the single house stood as if on a parched island. As a child I
remember passing by and feeling something like vertigo. You walk down a path
that’s filled with vegetation, but as soon as the tree line breaks, the space
opens out to this seemingly vast expanse and there’s this lone anchor embedded
in the middle of it. Hill’s ground of “plain salt-bleached grass” brought all
this back to me. As with the space she describes in her book, what I remember
is an area utterly different from the surrounding fields. Punctuated by the
brick domes of the coke ovens and no doubt blasted by years of their exhaust
fumes, it felt flat, bleached and drained. There was also this long, serpentine
chemical pipe running across the far side like some kind of zonal marker.

Heavy rain

When I went back there the whole place was smaller. It was
compact, neat and even. Just a house beyond a fence. I doubt this difference
came about due to the shaping and re-shaping of the landscape. In fact, I doubt
that my earlier version ever physically existed. So where did it this
‘remembered’ area actually come from in the first place? It feels like an old
memory rather than a recently mis-remembered veneer. The combined scene of
factories, water and strange dereliction is one that I’ve often imaginatively
returned to. And it’s been the connection – emotional, probably – to this set
of images that has led me to certain texts, not the other way round. That’s to
say, I don’t think reading James et al has embellished this place-memory. I’ve
gravitated towards his texts and similar, in part, in order to further extend a
type of psychic purchase in the memory of an area that was already heavily
embellished.

I like these hinterlands precisely because they carry this generative
effect: they prompt ideas and images. My home town and its environs is full of
yards, quarries, canal paths and millponds. The train out of Accrington
used to pass over all kinds of factory sites with their standing waters,
holding areas and stockpiles. It was not unlike flying over an apocalyptic
scene. Every time, the response was a series of questions: what is this place?
Who works here? What happened here? The resonance they emit has little to do
with a ‘past’ or any other original point. Instead, it’s more like a continuing
oscillation. Now that the industrial and geographic landscape of Route 6 has
changed, I don’t mourn the ‘loss’ of the canal side I knew as a child. I never
knew it in this form. The weird vista I’ve had in my head for a couple of
decades has always been in there. And I’m happy for it to stay in its dome and
to continue to develop in whichever way it wants.

Hill knew all about this internal landscape. Here’s how she
described Suffolk
in “the Seventies”:

The blackened hull of
a rotting boat lay low in the mud. The last geese squawked home in the
darkening sky. I sensed ghosts everywhere, looked behind me as I walked faster.
There was a strange, steely light glinting, and shadows. Easy to let your
imagination run away with you there and the scene stayed with me, though it was
another 10 years before I actually made use of it.

She made use of it when composing The Woman in Black. Imaginary Suffolk
was transplanted to some indeterminate “corner” as part of Kipps’s journey “North”.
Whatever haunted her about her daily walking route had little to do with the
land itself. What stayed with her was the germ of the work to come.

About Me

Strange Dimensions: A Paranthropology Anthology

Collection of essays edited by Jack Hunter features my essay on William Burroughs, magick and recording technology. Available now.

Terrorism Considered as One of the Fine Arts

Annotated screenplay text with archival dossier, unpublished writings and a series of new essays. Nohzone Archive.

Framework 52: Things Fall Apart.

2 volume set of texts, documents, extracts, photographs and essays covering the life and work of Peter Whitehead. Available now from Wayne State University Press.

Selections from the Nohzone Archive.

Collection of rare photographs and previously unpublished documents covering the production of Peter Whitehead's films between 1965 and 1969. Part of the digital resource collection 'Rock n Roll, Counterculture, Peace and Protest'. Available now from Adam Matthew Digital.

Crash Cinema: Representation in Film

Collection of essays edited by Mark Goodall, Jill Good and Will Godfrey featuring my essay on Herk Harvey's Carnival of Souls (1962). Available now from Cambridge Scholar's Press.

Telegraph for Garlic

Collection of essays on Bram Stoker's Dracula edited by Samia Ounoughi that features my essay on Dracula and phonography. Available now from Red Rattle Books.